Jeffrey Mishlove (3:52)

Well, I'm delighted to be with you and I suppose the really big development since we spoke last is your work with the Essentia Foundation. From all that I can gather, it's taken things to a new level.

Bernardo Kastrup (4:08)

Yeah, the foundation started very modestly. Now it's almost one of the most. Yeah, I would say one of the publications around philosophy that most people visit regularly. Our videos are getting millions of views which we didn't expect. We never saw this coming. The website is getting loads of hits as well. So. Yeah, that has grown to a proportion that was unimaginable four years from now when we started.

Jeffrey Mishlove (4:41)

And obviously your main purpose, I will call it, your main purpose is to awaken people to the reality, as you see it, of analytical idealism. The idea that we live in a mental world primarily, fundamentally, not a physical world.

Bernardo Kastrup (5:05)

Yeah. Essentially it's not dedicated to analytic idealism in particular, but to all idealisms. Any metaphysical view that entails consciousness being the fundamental ground of reality. And we publish stuff that is relevant to this view. So not only essays and videos that promote this view, but also those that have interesting arguments against it that we think are valuable as part of the discussion. So it's quite broad. Although the mission is indeed around idealism.

Jeffrey Mishlove (5:41)

Good. Let me ask you then, what do you think is the strongest oppositional argument?

Bernardo Kastrup (5:48)

Oh, it's very. It's becoming very hard now. Most oppositional arguments are usually based on a misunderstanding of idealism. Like people say, say, for instance, if all is mind, how come the world is so regular and there are laws of physics? Well, it's only human minds that seem to be irregular and unpredictable. That doesn't apply to mind as an ontological category. Right. The universe can be mental and still be very regular and predictable because ment is based on regular archetypes and all that stuff. So a lot of the arguments are based on misunderstandings. Some of them are based on a gut feeling. And there is nothing wrong with it. It is just we are embedded in a culture at all times. And that culture sort of gives us an intermediary layer between us and reality. We don't have a direct relationship with reality and it's mediated by the narratives and the values of our culture. And those narratives and values have instigated into all of us the notion that this is physical stuff. In other words, non mental stuff. There is no positive definition of physicality. It's a negative definition. Physical is that which is not mental. This idea has been inculcated in all of us for two centuries almost now. So it's okay that people think. Well, it goes too far for me to now think that Consciousness as an ontological category is the ground of being. Because that's not how I grew up. That's not what I've been taught. And after 60 or 70 years of that, it's indeed very difficult. But none of these are valid rational or philosophical arguments. So today I don't think there is any really strong argument against idealism.

Jeffrey Mishlove (7:48)

It's mostly a cultural habit.

Bernardo Kastrup (7:51)

Yes. Or misunderstanding because of cultural habits. So, yeah, at the end, it comes down to cultural habits.

Jeffrey Mishlove (7:58)

You know, I've been very influenced by a great sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but he looks at metaphysics as what he calls the glue that holds a whole society together. So he thought metaphysics, metaphysics was extremely important. And in his way of looking at history, Western culture has been glued together by materialistic metaphysics since the Renaissance.

Bernardo Kastrup (8:29)

Yeah. Since around that time, materialism has been calibrating and modulating our lives. For us, of course, it became dominant only in the 19th century, early to mid 19th century, around the July Revolution in 1830 and so on. But, yeah, for our generations, it has been the water we swim in. And what is remarkable to me is that the more you are sort of a victim of your cultural milieu, the more you fall victim to it, the less you understand how much a culturally chosen metaphysics influences your life. Right. So it is the people who are most affected by the metaphysics of the culture who will say that metaphysics is as useful for humans as ornithology is useful for bees, which is a very popular thing to say, and you may score some points in your social environment, but it's absolute, utter nonsense, because it is our metaphysics, even if it is taken for granted, not thought through, even more in those cases that calibrates, for instance, our understanding of the meaning of life, our values, how to relate to ourselves, other people in the world at large. All of this, in other words, the whole of life is calibrated by our metaphysical narratives, assumptions and intuitions, and most of those are given by the culture. For sure.

Jeffrey Mishlove (10:19)

In Sorokin's model, since I've brought it up, he points out that throughout history you can identify certain periods where the metaphysics of a culture changes, as he regards metaphysics to be the ultimate glue holding a society together. Those periods of transition can be very rough, very dangerous. In fact, Sorokin wrote a book, believe it was in 1934, called the Crisis of Our Age, in which he said, the materialistic metaphysics is breaking down, and the Famines and wars that we've seen and the war that he saw was about to come, are all symptoms of this underlying shift in metaphysics?

Bernardo Kastrup (11:10)

Absolutely. I think the last time a remarkable shift has taken place was around the middle of the 19th century because it was a time when the Industrial Revolution elevated the bourgeoisie to the level of dominant class, as opposed to the aristocracy or the clergy. And of course the clergy who were dominant up until the middle of the 19th century or so, their entire power base was metaphysically metaphysics, determined dualism, religion and all that. So when the bourgeoisie took over in social influence around the middle of the 19th century, they brought with it the materialist metaphysics. You always have to come up with a metaphysics that legitimizes your position and your views in society. Right. For the bourgeoisie, materialist consumption was a way of life and the basis of power. Your power is not because of in which family family you were born or how much theology you studied. It's how much money you make by selling and buying stuff and keeping that money in the bank. So materialism became predominant and of course, Darwin was the coup de grace in that whole thing because what the clergy still had going for them was the power to explain life. And Darwin came around and proposed something that was claimed to explain life without any of the dualist metaphysics of the clergy or any of the theology of the aristocracy, because kings were supposed to be God's representatives on earth and all that. And after the French Revolution there was a bit of a backlash on all that. So it was around that time that the last major shift happened towards physicalism. The smart people of the time understood significance of it. Nietzsche understood the significance of it, and he wrote about it like 50 years before anybody else truly grasped the significance of what happened. If you ask me, I think that's happening again. 200 years later, it's happening again. Physicalism is. It's a dead man walking. You know, there is only so far cultural reflexes and prejudice can deter the power of reason and evidence. There is only so far you can play that game. Eventually, reason and evidence, purely by their staying power, sort of win. And I think we are seeing that right now in the 2000s and certainly into the 2000s.

Jeffrey Mishlove (14:01)

Well, you base your arguments largely by avoiding issues relating to the paranormal, looking at more conventional philosophical and scientific approaches. But did you know that Darwin's partner or co inventor of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, was a spiritualist and an active proponent of paranormal research?

Bernardo Kastrup (14:30)

I'm not a a critic of paranormal research at all. I think analytic idealism gives enough substantiation for us to even think of paranormal phenomenon as almost banal, certainly ordinary. Why wouldn't that be the case? That occasionally I can pick up on your thoughts and you on mine. If we are both part of one field of subjectivity and mind is fundamental, we're not sort of locked in inside your skull because it's generated by your brain. So I'm very comfortable with all that. And I've publicly stated that too. What I don't do is I don't use evidence for the paranormal as an argument for idealism as opposed to physicalism. And there are a couple of reasons for that, Jeff. One is my own affinity. I find the normal incredibly mysterious already. So the paranormal, for me, it's like my interest will jump to that once I know what a grain of salt is, if you know what I mean. I am too aware of where we actually are in our understanding of nature to be able to dismiss the normal as insignificant and get attracted by the paranormal. I do recognize the paranormal as ordinary. My girlfriend, my partner, she's very good at picking up stuff from the ether and knowing what's going on far away in that precise moment. So I don't have an issue with that. It's just that we have these spontaneous interests in different fields. My interest is mostly on the so called normal because I understand how deeply mysterious it is. Another reason is that I also don't want to implicitly convey the message that if I focus on the paranormal as evidence for idealism, I may be interpreted as conceding that all the normal stuff is consistent with physicalism. And no, I don't concede that. I think the normal contradicts physicalism. We see that in foundations of physics. We see that in the neuroscience of consciousness. So I don't want to make that concession. I want to stick to the normal because I don't want to surrender that to the opposition. There is no reason to surrender that.

Jeffrey Mishlove (16:58)

From my point of view, I would say that the major obstacle I see with idealism, especially analytical idealism as you've expressed it, which is the version of idealism I happen to be the most familiar with, is why is it that we experience ourselves as separate, since we're all connected, we're all part of one consciousness? Why isn't that more obvious to each of us? How do we develop these separate identities?

Bernardo Kastrup (17:31)

Any metaphysics you choose has a problem, right? In two cases. That problem is very fundamental, I think in Analytic idealism, there is a problem, but it's not fundamental at all. So in physicalism, the problem is how do you account for consciousness and experience if everything that exists is unconscious? In dualism, it's the interaction problem. If there is mental stuff and physical stuff and they are fundamentally different, then how do they interact? On what basis do they interact? And for idealism is, if everything is one mind, why do I feel like a small little guy facing the monstrosity of the world? In this latter case, I think there is a explanation that we know to hold in mental space. We know that a single human being can dissociate into multiple, seemingly disconnected centers of awareness that psychiatry calls alters. And sometimes these centers of awareness are aware of each other, sometimes they are not. And there is a lot of clinical evidence that they are concurrently aware. It's not like you start your operating system in Windows and then you shut it down and you start up in Linux with another personnel. Now these personalities seem to coexist and be co conscious. So we know that this happens in mental space. There is centuries of clinical evidence for it. And now in the 21st century, there is neuroimaging evidence for it. We know that dissociative identity disorder has signs in an FMRI that betray its presence. You can diagnose it based on the patterns you see in a functional mri, in a functional brain scan. So all that we need to do is to extrapolate what we know happens in the mind of a person to the mind of the universe. It's not a fundamental problem. We know the thing happens. We know mental space can fragment into seemingly disjoint centers of awareness. So the postulate is simply, okay, what happens in a person happens at the level of nature as a whole. And we are the alters of the mind of nature. And by the way, we can also be diagnosed as alters because we look like something. We look like biology. Alters look like biology, right? When we look around and we see other living beings, that's the sign that there are dissociated alters of the mind of nature out there. In the case of a person with dissociative identity disorder, it's the patterns of certain functional MRI scans that betray the presence of the alters. In our case, what betrays it's biology. We don't need a brain scanner because we are already inside the mind of nature. Right?

Jeffrey Mishlove (20:29)

Well, I think the evidence from dissociative identity disorder does support idealism in general. In particular, the fact that one alter might have an Allergy and another alter might not have that same allergy. Or the colors of the eyes can change things of that sort, that would seem to completely defy the idea of physical causation.

Bernardo Kastrup (20:59)

There you go. And we don't. Even if you ask me personally, I have had what you could call semi dissociative experience. It's very mild, nothing pathological. But I'll give you one example. There was a time, years ago, I realized I have pain. And it was a funny pain. And I thought, okay, I have to look at it. I went to my doctor and I told my doctor. It was like the next day I went to my doctor and said, I have this pain. And my doctor asked me, okay, since when are you having this pain? And only then I realized I've been having this for a couple of weeks. But if you had asked me two days earlier, are you in pain? I would have told you in full honesty, honest to God, I would have told you, no, I have no pain. I was dissociated from my pain. And once that dissociation ends, you know retroactively that you were dissociated because you have the memories of both dissociated complexes. So when I was in front of my doctor, I had the memory of me the day before knowing that I was in pain, and I had the memory of me two days before thinking that I was not in pain, but knowing then retroactively that I actually was. So that this stuff can happen in mind space, to me, it's self evident. I think everybody can figure that out just by paying attention to their inner life. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that not only doesn't favor introspection, it actively tries to steer you away from introspection. But if you do pay introspective attention, I think you can easily find instances in which you yourself is sort of split into multiple.

Jeffrey Mishlove (22:53)

I know in your recent book Analytical Idealism in a Nutshell, you refer to the thinking of our mutual friend Bernard Carr, who is very interested in multiple dimensions of both space and time as a way to potentially explain this idea of how altars are formed. Or Tom Campbell likes to use the phrase individuated units of consciousness. Do you have any further thoughts about that?

Bernardo Kastrup (23:27)

Yes, yes. Look, there is one thing I will acknowledge. It's very hard to visualize dissociation explicit and coherently, because what it's asking us to do is to take seriously the thought that I am you right now, while I am me. How do we visualize, how do we conceive of this? Coherently and explicitly. Right? It's difficult. We have plenty of empirical evidence for the fact that this can happen and it does happen, and it has been happening for centuries. So, okay, you could say the empirical evidence show that this happens. So we don't need to visualize it. But it would be much more satisfying if we could visualize the mechanism, if we could have this closure, this conceptual closure, like, oh, I see, I see what the mechanism is. I see how the process leads to this. And one way to visualize this is along the lines of Bernard Carr. If you think of time as multidimensional, just like spaces, then you can think of every dissociated alter having its own timeline. And when I talk to you, essentially I am talking to myself across timelines. In other words, outside of time, I would remember my life and your life as my own life, and you would remember your life and mine as your own life. But through the magic of multidimensionality, which is very popular in physics for all kinds of reasons, there is no reason a priori why we couldn't apply that to time. The idea would be, well, this thing that you and I are is traversing different timelines. Within that timeline, you only recollect the past of that timeline. But nature arranges itself in such a way that what we are can talk to itself across timelines. And when that happens, we think we are other. That's a way to visualize this dissociation.

Jeffrey Mishlove (25:39)

Since you've brought up dissociative identity disorder, it's a topic that's been on my mind quite a bit since we spoke last. Now, I looked into the psychiatric literature, the psychological literature, and I'm pretty sure the mainstream view of this is that these alters are not really separate identities. They are figments of a single personality that has gotten split off. However, I have encountered two individuals who strike me as being very different. I call them two souls in one body. I refer to them by their names, Annika and Tristan. One is an 18 year old female, the other is a 37 year old male. I've done seven interviews with them. Now. They genuinely appear to me to be quite distinct from each other. I don't think of them in the least as being figments of one personality. And to my knowledge, this is something that would be very supportive of analytical idealism. And yet I don't believe it's actually been acknowledged in the psychological or psychiatric literature.

Bernardo Kastrup (26:59)

I think of personality already as a dissociative differentiation. Right. Because when we say this person has a personality what we mean is there are characteristics attributed to that person that differed from the characteristics that we attribute to other people, right? So in a universe in which there is no dissociation, there is no personality, because there is no differentiation. It's all the one. The one there is. And you can't attribute personality to that. You can attribute archetypes to that. Because whatever nature is, even if it is one, it is the one it is, and not some other one that it conceivably could have been. So it still has attributes that define its being, but not a personality. So from the point of view of analytic idealism, I would be in principle, completely comfortable even with the notion that all dissociated alters are illusory. I would be comfortable with that because I think this is exactly what's going on, you and I. Our personalities simply reflect the particular contents of dissociated complexes in the mind of nature. The one field of subjectivity that I think exists and that ultimately there is only that and everything else is a behavior of nature. It's something nature is doing, not something nature fundamentally is. I don't think Bernardo exists fundamentally, or Jeff. I think Jeff and Bernardo are things nature is doing. And one day it will stop doing us and nothing is going to be lost. Just like a dancer that stops dancing didn't lose anything. It just stopped dancing.

Jeffrey Mishlove (28:42)

Well, it's an interesting way to think about it. But let me ask you this. I know we've had this discussion in the past about that. As I recall, you've described our bodies as simply what our consciousness appears to be from the outside, from the viewpoint of another individual.

Bernardo Kastrup (29:06)

The immediate protest that many people would make against this idea is that clearly certain patterns of brain activity correlate with my mental inner life. But what about my liver? What about my kidneys? What about my appendix? What about my right toenail? Right. No, nails don't apply because nails are not alive. They are keratin. So what about my left big toe? Something like that. And the answer is the following. There is every evolutionary advantage for the outer that we are to have internal dissociations. For instance, if you had to attend to doing the mental function that we call blood filtration, if you had to attend to that, or beating your heart, if you had to attend to that. I have to beat my heart now. I have to beat my heart now. You wouldn't be able to do anything else. Because if you're not attending to that because you have to drive, your heart stops. There is only. Well, there's certainly one function that slides both ways. It can be left alone and it's automatic, or you can attend to it and take direct control of it. That's breathing. It's the only thing that if you're not thinking about it, it happens. But you can also decide to stop breathing. Other functions are either autonomous or they are voluntary. Right? If you ride a bike, it's voluntary. Well, even that can be highly automated. You're not attending to every muscle movement you make when you ride a bike. So evolutionarily speaking, it's incredibly advantageous for us to have internal dissociative walls. So stuff can happen in parallel. You know, there is that mental process that appears from the outside as kidney function and that other dissociated mental process, internally dissociated, that appears as liver function or digestion or hormone production or growth or whatever. So the idea under analytic idealism is if this meat, electrochemically active meat inside your skull, correlates to conscious experience, which it clearly does, then every electrochemically active piece of meat in your body also correlates with inner experience. Otherwise you have to impose a completely arbitrary boundary in nature. If meat is correlated with experience in one case, why would it not in the other case? Right? So the idea is that the entire body is what our mental inner life looks like. But the reporting ego, that particular complex that calls itself by your name, is not associated with everything that you actually are. And we have again over a century of depth psychology with overwhelming clinical evidence that this is exactly what's happening. We are not aware of all the mentation that constitutes us.

Jeffrey Mishlove (32:32)

Now, recently I've completed about 15 hours of interviews with someone I know. You've also interacted with Tom Campbell, who is an idealist who bases his model on, I guess you would call it the simulation hypothesis. His point of view is that to the extent that I've never opened up my skull, my brain doesn't even exist at all. It's simply information that is being rendered, you would say, by the larger consciousness system, the way a computer renders things in a computer game.

Bernardo Kastrup (33:10)

I agree with that. I think the contents of perception, they are like dashboard indications. So everything that we call material or physical, which are the contents of perception, the stuff we touch, hear, see, and so forth, everything that we call physical or material comes into existence only when it's being perceived, because they are contents of perception. Physicality is not the thing perceived, just like the sky is not the airplane's dashboard. But if you want to have a dashboard indication, then you need the dashboard. Right. Dashboard indications only exist insofar as the airplane is measuring certain states in the sky. If you're not making that measurement, then the dashboard shows nothing. Now my contention is that the physical or material world are dashboard indications. If you're not making the measurement, if you're not looking, then there is nothing physical or material. There is that which when observed, appears to us as physicality that exists. And it will exist whether you are measuring or not. The sky is there even if there are no airplanes flying around making measurements to display on the dashboard. But that which exists is not physical, it's mental. Physicality, in my view, is just the contents of the dashboard as provided by evolution by natural selection. So I agree with Tom unreservedly on this. I myself don't use the word simulation hypothesis because I think it's liable to a lot of misunderstanding. The main one being that if you say this is all a simulation, it may convey the message that it's deliberate, that this has been engineered to deceive. And I don't think that is going on. I'm a naturalist. I think we are being deceived by materiality only in the same way that we can say the sun is deceiving us because it appears to move around the Earth. No, the sun is not deceiving anyone. We are confused. That's all there is to it. It's not a grand conspiracy on the side, on the part of nature to create engender a simulation that deceives us. Nature is just being what it is and we get confused about it sometimes. I think we got confused about what physicality is. We think it is the thing in itself. I think it's just an appearance, just a dashboard indication. But that doesn't mean that there is a grand deliberate simulation engineered to confuse us. Monkeys don't need conspiracies to be confused. They are very naturally confused. Monkeys tend to be very confused.

Jeffrey Mishlove (35:54)

You're bringing up another subject which is dear to me actually has to do with quantum physics. And I know you and I have spoken about quantum physics in the past and the idea of the so called collapse of the quantum wave function. According to some of the earlier writings of Wigner and von Neumann, it takes consciousness to collapse the wave function. But today mainstream physicists reject that interpretation almost entirely. They would say the wave function can be collapsed if it's recorded by an instrument. And magnetic recording, for example, by a completely non conscious instrument. That's quite sufficient to collapse the wave function. Have you any thoughts on that?

Bernardo Kastrup (36:48)

Let me start by saying, I do not believe in collapse, let alone consciousness causing collapse. I think the consciousness causes collapse interpretation sort of suggests, indicates that there is a physical universe out there that isn't mental and that our mentation, our consciousness somehow has a superhero like magical effect on that non mental universe out there. That it changes that non mental universe by a mere act of observation. I don't think that's what's going on. I don't think we have these superhero powers to change something that is truly out there merely by looking at it. I think collapse is epistemic. I think what's going on is that we can't predict everything nature will do because of epistemic limitations. We don't have enough knowledge, enough theory or enough measurements to be able to predict everything. So the wave function reflects the best of, of our knowledge about what's going on. And when we look, we find out what's going on. It doesn't mean that everything was in an ontic state of physical non mental superposition and that an observation changed the ontic state of the world. I think the wave function is epistemic. It's a matter of how much we know, how we can bet on what the world is doing. But we don't have complete theory, we don't have complete information, so we can't know for sure. So the wave function is just that, our betting strategy. That's what I think. Having said that, I think operationally it is untenable, or philosophically is untenable at an operational level to say that we have proven that consciousness has that what passes for collapse. There is something that passes for collapse. And I was having a discussion with Roger Penrose last year and I was saying, oh, the wave function is epistemic. And he was saying, ah, come on, Bernardo, there was something in one state before you looked and it's another state after you look. So something has to have happened. Well, what I disputed that is that the state before you looked was really real. I think it's just our inference, it's the best of our knowledge of what it was. I don't think there was any ontic transition. Having said that, to finally get to your point, when people say what passes for collapse can be caused by an instrument, I think they are very equivocated. They are not being sharp on their philosophy, on their lines of reasoning. Because. Because even if you, let's say you are doing the double slit experiment and if you don't measure anything, you get an interference pattern after the electrons go through the slits but if you put a detector at the two slits, you lose the interference pattern. You just get two bands of electrons on the surface after the double slit. And then there was an experiment done in the late 90s, I think, in Israel, in which they put these two detectors and nobody was looking. The two detectors were there, sort of imagine that it's closed in a room and there is nobody inside that room. So they put the two detectors, and then when you look at the screen, there are only the two bars. So the detectors collapse the wave function. That was the argument. The flaw here is pretty obvious. So obvious that a lot of people miss it. You only know that when you look at the end of the experiment, you only see the two bands when you look. Somebody has to look to know. If nobody looks, you don't know. There's nothing you can say about it. And this goes back to von neumann in the 1930s, in which he explained that every interaction only leads to entanglement. There is nothing in the mathematics of quantum theory, not even modern variations, which leads to this nonlinear change in state. When the detectors interact with the electrons going through a slit, they become entangled. So now you have entangled electrons, entangled with the detectors, entangled with the projection screen, entangled with the slits. The whole room is entangled. For all you know, you cannot say the room had a definite state until you look when you open the door and you see the result. Oh, yeah, now you saw two bands. But you can't say that it was the detectors that created the two bands, because you are looking at a hole, a holistic entangled system. And it was your entering the room that, quote, collapsed it into the definite state you've seen. So it's epistemically impossible at a very fundamental level to claim categorically that what passes for collapse can be done without conscious observation. Literally. You cannot know that because knowledge exists in consciousness.

Jeffrey Mishlove (42:16)

Well, that was an elaborate answer. It does raise many questions. But instead of pursuing those at the moment, I want to go back to an earlier statement you made along the way about superpowers, that you don't think humans have a superpower of collapsing the wave function by just observing it. I know you've been willing to concede a certain amount of extrasensory perception, for example, that you, your partner, experiences, I presume, relatively regularly. But what about psychokinesis? What about the people who claim that they can stare at a fork and the fork will just droop and start to melt? Do you have any thoughts about claims of psychokinesis in terms of your philosophy.

Bernardo Kastrup (43:11)

First, let me establish the difference in my mind between the superhero powers I was talking about and psychokinesis. The consciousness causes collapse interpretation would mean that whether you want it or not, Whether you are focusing it or not, Whether you are trying to do it or not, by merely looking at the world, you defined what the world is. It's a fantastic claim. The other claim is that if you focus on it, if you apply techniques and will and you spend the time, you may have some influence on a very small part of the world. I accept the latter, I don't accept the former. And I think there is a gaping abyss in magnitude between the two. The reason I accept the letter is that no process in nature is perfect. A star never burns. Everything it has to burn, it goes supernova, it scatters its ashes around. Even if you have a bonfire in your backyard, not everything that can be burned will be burned by fire. The sun doesn't dry the streets instantly after a storm. No process in nature is like 100% foolproof, perfect. Why would dissociation be? The onus of argument would be on someone who says dissociation is foolproof. It's impermeable. There is no direct commerce of mental states Across a dissociative boundary. Well, that is a big claim, because nothing else in nature is like this. Everything else in nature goes a long way, but stops short of perfection. I think that the null hypothesis, dissociation is like that. Some of us have more permeable. Others have less permeable dissociative boundaries. But there is always a degree of permeability. Stuff can percolate through without having to be mediated by sense perception or physical action, which basically moves our dissociative boundaries to sort of impinge into the world. Can there be a bypass of that process? Yes, I think that's the null hypothesis. And some people, like my girlfriend, have weak dissociative boundaries in a certain way. I am, in principle, willing to accept as perfectly rational and coherent the hypothesis that some people can exert a physical effect in the world without moving the dissociative boundary itself. But across the dissociative boundary. I can accept that, and I do without contradicting my aversion to this superhero hypothesis that we always change the entire universe just by looking at it.

Jeffrey Mishlove (46:17)

Well, one of your intellectual heroes is Schopenhauer, who wrote the book on will, will and representation. And I suppose this is what we're talking about, Human intention as opposed to perception, Also breaking through a dissociative boundary.

Bernardo Kastrup (46:38)

Schopenhauer thought that through the intensity of our observation of the world, we could capture the archetypes that underlie the world and become one with the world. It's a sort of a forward escape. You escape perception by investing unreservedly in perception until you sort of break through it, and it's an expression of intent. I think in the east, most philosophical schools related to Buddhism, to Hinduism, and to the spiritual streams and philosophical streams that preceded Hinduism and Buddhism goes back to the civilization of the Indus Valley. They emphasize discipline and deliberate effort. I honor that. I don't think, however, that that's the only way. I think some people are simply naturally predisposed to these things, and other people are naturally very hard heads like me. I can only get a glimpse of this if I take a very high dose of psychedelic substances and then it does the thing, then I know what people are talking about. You cannot not know. It's very in your face. But I don't think any amount of discipline and dedication would get someone like me across that line. This is not in the cards that nature handed me in the beginning. I'm good at other things. At this I'm hopeless, I think.

Jeffrey Mishlove (48:26)

Bernardo, in our previous lengthy conversation over three and a half years ago, you talked about the daimon that was influencing you and compelling you actually to live the life that you now live, to be the person who you are. And now you've written a book on the Daimon and the soul of the West. So obviously you've done a lot of elaboration on that idea of the daimonic influences in our lives.

Bernardo Kastrup (49:01)

It's my life. It's what I live every day, 24 hours a day and years ago. I lived it unconsciously and therefore resisted it and undermined it without knowing. And you paid a price for that. Now I. I do it consciously and in full acceptance. So that is the substance of my life. And at some point, it's difficult for an alter to not write about that which was the underlying substrate of everything he or she has written before. Right. Honesty eventually compels us to sort of show our cards and confess. It's a confession, sort of a philosophical or spiritual confession. So that's what this book is, it's my confession.

Jeffrey Mishlove (49:55)

Well, your use of the term daimon is, I think, important. It suggests a personal relationship. It suggests that you're not just dealing with a philosophical principle like teleology. You're dealing with an entity.

Bernardo Kastrup (50:15)

It is a felt presence, a very clear, often overwhelming felt presence. It is impossible to deny it unless you have a tremendous amount of prejudice and willful ignorance. I personify it because I follow a suggestion made by Jung many decades ago. Jung suggested that the force of the impersonal in us is so powerful, it can also be monstrous. It's so overwhelming that the only way for us to retain some degree of moral ground is to exteriorize it and personify it and say, that is not me that acts through me, but it is not me. You retain your ability to pass moral judgment on things, to stop yourself from doing things that are immoral, unethical, just because you have that natural impulse behind it. So that's what I do. But the daimon, as I experience it, is largely impersonal. It's one of its key characteristics. It doesn't give a damn about our personal agenda, whether we will be successful or not, whether we have food on the table tomorrow or be able to pay the mortgage and the health insurance. It doesn't give a damn. It's a compelling, sometimes overwhelming impetus to pursue certain directions in life which I then deliberately exteriorize and personify. So I retain some moral ground. You see, I am open to the possibility that there is some degree of differentiation to the daimon as I experience it, as opposed to the daimon as Socrates experienced it, or the daimon as you experience it. I think we all experience the diamond. I just don't know it. I am open to the possibility that there is some differentiation that what the impersonal wants to do through me can be very different from what the impersonal wants to do through other living beings. And I think that's just natural diversity. How far I would go in actually saying the daimon is an entity. I wouldn't deny this completely. I think it would be dishonest of me to say, no, the daimon is just some kind of amorphous ocean of something. No, that's not how I experience it. There is some differentiation, some degree of individuality to it, but it is vague. It seamlessly morphs with the impersonal of the rest of nature. It's not like something you can trace a boundary around and say, this is it. And not that. It's like a storm. It has boundaries, but they are not defined boundaries. They sort of merge into the surrounding sky. That's how I experienced the daimon.

Jeffrey Mishlove (53:21)

Well, it's hard to talk about the idea of a daimon without, as you have done, invoking Socrates, who seemed to be, at least in the words of Plato, the most articulate expounder of his experience with the Daimon. And I seem to recall, I'm not 100% sure that his Daimon would speak to him and tell him things. And I believe he said they're invariably true.

Bernardo Kastrup (53:56)

Yes, Socrates Daimon was very unique because his Daimon would only tell him what not to do, never what to do. Let me take a step back and just clarify what I mean by the diamond so your audience, don't, don't misunderstand me. We all, I think, experience what I call the flow of the impersonal within us. There is a will within us that does not have our ego as target or is not serving the ego. And you often see that when people cannot help but do something in their lives that other people tell them, why are you doing this? It will get you nowhere. And then people say, I don't know why I'm doing it. I only know that I need to do do it. That is it. That, that is the diamond right there. It's that wheel within us that does not have the best interest of our ego at heart. It has a sort of a, an impersonal, a natural direction that doesn't favor us. It favors whatever it is that is trying to do through us. So it's the flow of the natural impersonal within us, the, the states of mind, the wishes, the perception of meaning that we have within us and act through us and compel us to act, which are not related to our personal narrative of success or our personal ambitions. That's what I mean by the daimon. And it's useful to personalize it like Socrates did. In the case of Socrates, he would, when making a choice, he would pay attention to that flow of the impersonal within him that would signal to him, oh no, this is not it. And then he would stop and course, correct. So he wrote that his diamond was a force that stopped him from taking the wrong decisions, but it was not a force that told him what to do. And he was so at ease with this. This was for him such an obvious, clear, lived reality that he allowed himself to be executed during his trial. Well, in Greece, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his teachings. And he was trialed and he was condemned. And he didn't defend himself during his trial. And he was waiting to see if his Daimon would tell him, don't do this. In other words, don't not defend yourself. Course, correct. Do something else. But his diamond was silent throughout his trial, never told him to stop being silent. And so he was condemned and executed by drinking poison because he didn't defend himself, he could have easily survived. He would have gotten away with, at best, the worst case scenario, he would have been exiled, which for an ancient Greek was almost as bad as death, but not quite as death. But he could have gotten away with it completely if he had defended himself. But he trusted his diamond. His diamond was such an obvious, glaring reality to him that he allowed himself to be condemned and drink hemlock and die while he couldn't have stopped it, because his diamond didn't stop him from not defending himself. I mean, this is lived philosophy. This is not philosophy with a white lab coat that you go to the university and you do from nine to five and then you put in a drink drawer and you come back home to live real life. Now, this is lived philosophy. This is philosophy as it should be done by all of us. The only philosophy that is worth doing is lived philosophy, not conceptual masturbation. Excuse me for my crass terms, but there is so much conceptual masturbation published in highbrow academic philosophy journals. That's not the philosophy of Socrates. That's not the philosophy of Nietzsche, of Schopenhauer, of Kierkegaard. This is something else. This is a job, a clerical job. Real philosophy is a philosophy of the daimonic as Socrates lived it.

Jeffrey Mishlove (58:42)

Beautifully put. What a wonderful story. Of course, we live in an era where it's, I guess I'd have to call a Christian era in the West. And the word daimon immediately evokes the idea of the demonic.

Bernardo Kastrup (59:02)

That's the origin of the word demonic. But we have to explain how this came to be, the notion of a daimon in psychological terms, and this is the way Jung used the word. The daimon is a semi autonomous psychic complex in the collective unconscious. So Jung, I claim in one of my books, was an idealist. He saw the collective unconscious as the totality of existence and consciousness as just little islands that poke out of the collective unconscious. And when these islands look around, they see a physical world. So the physical world is just the appearance of the collective unconscious. And then the evidence that that's how he thought is that he is the notion of synchronicity. Because synchronicities are archetypal alignments of events that only is coherent. If you say that the physical world where the synchronicity happens is also driven by the archetypes, which is only coherent if the physical world is actually a mental world and it only appears to perception as what we call physical. For Jung, existence, the collective unconscious has not only islands of self reflective awareness, which he called consciousness in you and me, and to a lesser degree, other animals, plants. It also has semi autonomous mental complexes that do not have a physical correlate that we didn't evolve to pick out in the screen of perception because they don't have a direct bearing on our survival. In other words, whatever they are up to, we don't need to know because it will not increase or reduce our chances of surviving and reproducing. And if that's the case, we wouldn't have evolved to pick them out. We wouldn't have evolved to perceive them. That's all there is to it. There is no magic here, it's just evolution. But the fact that we didn't evolve to perceive them doesn't mean that they don't exist and can be picked out through introspection as opposed to perception. And Jung thought, based on decades of clinical evidence, that these psychic complexes are indeed in there. They are responsible for cases of so called possession or archetypal possession, which is not paranormal, but is very akin to what would be a paranormal case of possession. And some of these daimonic semi autonomous complexes can have an archetypal configuration, an archetypal admixture that we perceive as evil, that is evil according to our morality, to our ethics. Nature as it is is amoral. In other words, it's morally neutral. Nature is clearly amoral. It plays itself out. It's not not busy with value judgments about what is fair or not fair, what is good or not good. And so the daimons, these semi autonomous complexes drifting around in the collective unconscious, which, which are the waters of life, the waters in which we live, they are also in principle amoral, unless their particular archetypal admixture leads us to consider them good or bad. So the demons are the diamonds that have an archetypal admixture that we identify as evil. Other daimons are angels. Your guardian angel is, under this perspective, is a daimon. Socrates diamond was a guardian angel. My diamond is an instigator. It pushes me forward. It doesn't allow me to procrastinate too long, and it doesn't allow me to self indulge for too long. It is constantly reminding me my life is not about me. It's not about my suffering, my tinnitus, my goals, my comfort, the big house I want to buy. No, no, it's not about that. You are an instrument of nature and you will do what nature wants to do through you. That's my daimon. It's an instigator. I wouldn't call it demonic, even though it causes more than enough suffering. So a demon is a particular archetypal admixture of a daimon.

Jeffrey Mishlove (63:36)

Very well put. You have such a clear mind when it comes to making these fine distinctions. Let me conclude our interview with a thought. We have talked about instances of reported UFO contacts in our past discussions. You've written about it. These days it's all over the news. The hottest topic, probably on the New Thinking Allowed channel, has to do with government disclosure and who knows what and what is the real truth about these things. But there is a segment of the population that thinks of UFO activity as somehow demonic. And I wonder if you have any reflections at all about UFOs, especially in light of all the revelations that have taken place since we last spoke.

Bernardo Kastrup (64:31)

The understanding of this topic as conveyed, for instance, by Jacques Vallee and others. I was reading a book by someone else, I forgot his name. A very old book from the late 60s, 69 I think. And he has the same interpretation as Jacques Vallee that what we call aliens now is just the same thing that we used to call fairies and before that angels and demons. And all the way back into primordial history. This stuff has been around us. Can they be daimonic? They can be daimonic in the Jungian sense. This not entirely individuated. In other words, it's sort of an entity. You can call it an entity, but it's sort of smears itself out across existence. It doesn't have clear boundaries. It's almost to some extent impersonal, but differentiated enough that you can point at it and say that is a daimon. I think the aliens may be daimonic in that sense. They have always been here. They were not aliens before. They were just the fairies. There are many names for them. Them, they are a part of reality that we didn't evolve to pick out because they clearly don't have a drastic bearing on our ability to survive and reproduce. There are some reports of people being hurt by the so called aliens, but I don't think there are reports of people being killed or not being able to continue on with their lives. And if there are, they are so statistically minor that it wouldn't have given evolution an impetus to pick them out. So that's what I think of them. It's just what is out there. It's not, oh my God, something I made? No, it's just what is up there has always been out there. We as monkeys did not evolve a cognitive system to pick them out because it didn't provide us with a big evolutionary, evolutionary advantage to pick them out. Maybe it would even be advantageous to not pick them out for the same reason that it is advantageous that you don't perceive the tiger in India. Otherwise you'd freak out all the time for no reason. You wouldn't make love to your wife because you are picking out the tiger in India, right? And you're freaking out because of it. So evolution sometimes will very reasonably favor not picking certain things out. I think what we call the aliens, the fairies, this is stuff that is out there. Daimonic semi autonomous complexes that are out there, just like you and me and the elephant and the tiger and the trees. It's just out there. It's just part of nature, nothing extraordinary, just the stuff that exists and we didn't evolve to pick out. But they do have a minor bearing on us. Not enough to have favored the evolution of a way to pick them out, but enough for us to talk about and encoding mythology. And people have sensed these things under special circumstances throughout history, and we always have dressed them in the cultural dictionary of the time. So they were little army men that we called fairies before. Now our conceptual dictionary tells us that since we know everything there is to know about the Earth, which is ridiculous, it's, it's silly cultural prejudice, but that's what most people actually believe, that we have charted all there is to know about the Earth, therefore they can only be aliens. And sure enough, we go to them, or maybe they quote themselves as aliens, since we are not perceiving them, since they are being picked out by sort of a permeability of our dissociative boundary that goes straight into our, our cognitive system, our imagination. And therefore we have to imagine them because we can't perceive them. They are really out there. They are exerting a causal influence on us. But because it's not via the perceptual system, we have to give them form ourselves in order to tell ourselves what's going on, what we are, we are what we are picking out. And we dress them with the cultural language of the time. Right now they can only be aliens because we know everything that's going on on the planet that is not it. If that's too strange to be it, then it can only be aliens. So yes, I think I, I think Jacques Vallee and, and others give you another example, Patrick Harpur and, and, and others before them. They are talking about something that is real, that exists. What I would not tell you is that therefore or there are aliens in freezers and spaceships in secret hangers in Area 51. I do not know that. I would tend to think that insofar as there is something out there that can be measured and perceived and stored in a hangar, then it's probably not the same phenomenon that I just talked about. It is something a lot more tangible with its own sort of form that doesn't require our symbolic dressing. It has its own momentum, its own inertia. Does that exist? I don't know. Over a year ago I tended to think that they do because everything I heard and then I had a personal disappointment. And now I don't know. I don't know. I am open to the idea that all this stuff about aliens in freezers and spaceships in hangars, I'm open to the idea that, that all this stuff is just disinformation for psychological manipulation. But the stuff that Jacques wrote about and others relating all of this to ancient mythological traditions. Oh, that is real. All right. That is real. I've seen one. That is real.

Jeffrey Mishlove (70:47)

Well, Bernardo, what a pleasure to be with you and have this open ended, wide ranging conversation. Are there any final thoughts you'd like to leave with our viewers?

Bernardo Kastrup (70:59)

Oh, I'm very bad at answering this kind of question because usually I don't have any agenda when I'm having a conversation with you. The depth of the mystery of what constitutes the world in which we are living and the water in which we are swimming. A fish. The depth of that mystery goes far, far beyond what most people intuit. Most people think we've figured out most of it. We haven't even begun. Future generations will realize how far we are from truly grokking what's going on. I would suspend all judgment until that time.

Jeffrey Mishlove (71:38)

Bernardo, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me and with the New Thinking Allowed audience. It has been a joy.

Bernardo Kastrup (71:46)

It's always a joy for me too, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Mishlove (71:49)

My pleasure. And for those of you watching, watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.

Bernardo Kastrup (72:21)

Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.

Jeffrey Mishlove (72:36)

New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. It the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. Edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies, go to newthinkingalowed.org.